My understanding is that our work on this committee is not about us debating our own views; rather, it is about exploring what is going on, taking evidence on it and trying to get a deeper understanding of what we are looking at, what the impacts are and what kind of decisions the Scottish Parliament should make, and, as part of that, to advise the Scottish Government on what the committee thinks. Mr Balfour’s line of questioning was an attempt to understand how deep a problem we are dealing with and how much weight is being placed on people by the mass of things that we are all looking at all the time, as Adam Stachura so eloquently put it.
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Devolution is giving the Parliament the opportunity to create a social security system in Scotland, and that is not about saying, “Oh, we don’t like what they’re doing in the rest of the UK, so we’re going to mitigate it,” which would be a false premise for a social security system in Scotland; it is about devising and building a social security system that is based on what we want to deliver.
The reason why I asked whether pension credit should be a universal benefit is that, for me, anyway, the question is how we target the people who need help and ensure that the money that we have, which is limited—I do not think that any of us disagrees on that—is targeted at the people who need support, whether for a short time or permanently throughout their lives, so that we get the maximum impact where it is needed.
When we look at an issue such as this, all that we are really trying to do is assess the level of impact. Is the impact split? That is, although we can say, “Yes, the policy will impact on X number of people,” we must ask how many of those people the policy will put into poverty and seriously impact their ability to live the reasonable life that we would all expect as at least a minimum standard—although I guess that when we are talking about people of pensionable age we do not want to reduce the standard to a minimum.
I suppose that my question is, how much work do you expect your organisations to do on this issue, in the context of the independent work that the Parliament could be looking at? That is quite important, because for me it is about not mitigation but what we are trying to build, who we are trying to help and how we are trying to help them.